An Ocean Tragedy

An Ocean Tragedy

William Clark Russell

.

CHAPTER I.

MY COUSIN.

‘Sir Wilfrid Monson, sir,’ exclaimed my man.

It was half-past ten o’clock at night, and I was in my lodgings in Bury Street, St. James, slippers on feet, a pipe of tobacco in my hand, seltzer and brandy at my elbow, and on my knees the ‘Sun’ newspaper, the chief evening sheet of the times.

‘Sir Wilfrid Monson, sir.’

My cousin! thought I, starting, and looking round at my man with a fancy in me for a moment that he had got the wrong name. ‘Show him in.’

Sir Wilfrid entered in a sort of swift headlong way, full of nervousness and passion, as was to be seen easily enough; and then he came to a dead stop with a wild look round the room, as if to make sure that I was alone, and a frowning stare at my servant, who was lingering a moment on the threshold as though suddenly surprised out of his habits of prompt sleek attendance by a fit of astonishment.

He stood about six feet high; he had a slight stoop, and was something awkward in arms and legs; yet you were sensible of the indefinable quality of breeding in him the moment your eye took in his form and face, uncommon as both were. He was forty-four years of age at this time, and looked fifty. His hair was long and plentiful, but of an iron grey streaked with soft white. He had a protruding under-lip, and a nose which might have been broken for the irregularity of its outline, with unusually high-cut nostrils. His eyes were large, short-sighted, and grey, luminous and earnest, but with a tremulous lid that seemed to put a quivering into their expression that was a hint in its way of cunning and mental weakness. He had a broad, intellectual forehead, brilliantly white teeth, high cheek bones, a large heavy chin, rounding into a most delicately moulded throat. He was a man, indeed, at[2] whom, as a stranger, one might catch one’s self staring as at something sufficiently puzzling to be well worth resolving. Ill-looking he was not, and yet one seemed to seek in vain for qualities of body or mind to neutralise to the sight what was assuredly a combination of much that was uncomely, and indeed, in one or two directions, absolutely grotesque. But then I had the secret.

The long and short of it was, my cousin, Sir Wilfrid Monson, was not entirely straight-headed. Everything was made clear to the mind, after a glance at his strange, weak, yet striking profile, with the hint that there had been madness in his mother’s family. He was the eighth baronet, and on his father’s side (and that was my side, I am thankful to say) all had been sound as a bell; but my uncle had fallen in love with the daughter of a Scotch peer whose family were tainted with insanity—no matter her real name: the Lady Elizabeth will suffice. He was frankly warned by the old Earl, who was not too mad to be candid, but the lovesick creature grinned in his lordship’s face with a wild shake of the head at the disclosure, as though he saw no more in it than a disposition to end the engagement. Then the honest old madman carried him to a great window that overlooked a spacious sweep of lawn, and pointed with a bitter smile and a despairful heave of the shoulders to three women walking, two of whom were soberly clad in big bonnets and veils down their back, whilst the third, who was between them, and whose arms were locked in the others’, glided forwards as though her feet travelled on clockwork rollers, whilst she kept her head fixedly bent, her chin upon her breast, and her gaze rooted upon the ground; and as the amorous baronet watched—the Earl meanwhile preserving his miserable smile as he held his gouty forefinger levelled—he saw the down-looking woman make an effort to break away from her companions, but without ever lifting her head.

‘That’s Lady Alice,’ said the Earl, ‘speechless and brainless! Guid preserve us! And the Lady Elizabeth is her seester.’

‘Ay, that may be,’ answers the other; ‘but take two roses growing side by side: because some venomous worm is eating into the heart of one and withering up its beauty, is the other that is radiant and flawless to be left uncherished?’

‘Guid forbid!’ answered the Earl, and then turned away with a weak hech! hech! that should have proved more terrifying to one’s matrimonial yearnings than even the desolate picture of the three figures stalking the emerald-green sward.

These were dim memories, yet they flashed into my head with the swiftness of thought, along with the workings of the eager conjecture and lively wonder raised in me by Wilfrid’s visit, and by his peculiar aspect, too, during the few moments’ interval of pause that followed his entrance. My servant shut the door; Wilfrid looked to see that it was closed, then approached me with a sort of lifting of his face as of a man half choked with a hurry[3] and passion of sentences which he wants to be quit of all at once in a breath, staggering as he moved, his right arm outstretched with a rapid vibration of the hand at the wrist; and, without delivering himself of a syllable, he fell into a chair near the table, dashing his hat to the floor as he did so, buried his face in his arms, and so lay sobbing in respirations of hysteric fierceness.

This extraordinary behaviour amazed and terrified me. I will not deny that I at first suspected the madness that lurked as a poison in his blood had suddenly obtained a strong hold, and that he had come to see me whilst seized with a heavy fit. I put down my pipe and adopted a steadier posture, so to speak, in my chair, secretly hoping that the surprise his manner or appearance had excited in my valet would render the fellow curious enough to hang about outside to listen to what might pass at the start. I kept my eyes fixed upon my cousin, but without offering to speak, for, whatever might be the cause of the agitation that was convulsing his powerful form with deep sobbing breathings, the emotion was too overwhelming to be broken in upon by speech. Presently he looked up; his eyes were tearless, but his face was both dusky and haggard with the anguish that worked in him.

‘In the name of Heaven, Wilfrid,’ I cried, witnessing intelligence enough in his gaze to instantly relieve me from the dread that had possessed me, ‘what is wrong with you? what has happened?’

He drew a long tremulous breath and essayed to speak, but was unintelligible in the broken syllable or two he managed to utter. I poured what sailors term a ‘two-finger nip’ of brandy into a tumbler, and added a little seltzer water to the dram. He seized the glass with a hand that shook like a drunkard’s, and emptied it. But the draught steadied him, and a moment after he said in a low voice, while he clasped his hands upon the table with such a grip of each other that the veins stood out like whipcord: ‘My wife has left me.’

I stared at him stupidly. The disclosure was so unexpected, so wildly remote from any conclusion my fears had arrived at, that I could only look at him like a fool.

‘Left you!’ I faltered, ‘what d’ye mean, Wilfrid? Refused to live you?’

‘No!’ he exclaimed with a face darkening yet to the effort it cost him to subdue his voice, ‘she has eloped—left me—left her baby for—for—’ he stopped, bringing his fist to the table with a crash that was like to have demolished everything upon it.

‘It is an abominable business,’ said I soothingly; ‘but it is not to be bettered by letting feeling overmaster you. Come, take your time; give yourself a chance. You are here, of course, to tell me the story. Let me have it quietly. It is but to let yourself be torn to pieces to suffer your passion to jockey your reason.’

‘She has left me!’ he shrieked, rising bolt upright from his chair, and lifting his arms with his hands clenched to the ceiling.[4] ‘Devil and beast! faithless mother! faithless wife! May God——’

I raised my hand, looking him full in the face. ‘Pray sit, Wilfrid. Lady Monson has left you, you say. With or for whom?’

‘Hope-Kennedy,’ he answered, ‘Colonel Hope-Kennedy,’ bringing out the words as though they were rooted in his throat. ‘My good friend Hope-Kennedy, Charles; the man I have entertained, have hunted with, assisted at a time when help was precious to him. Ay, Colonel Hope-Kennedy. That is the man she has left me for, the fellow that she has abandoned her baby for. It is a dream—it is a dream! I loved her so. I could have kissed her breast, where her heart lay, as a Bible for truth, sincerity, and all beautiful thought.’

He passed his hand over his forehead and seated himself again, or rather dropped into his chair, resting his chin upon the palm of his hand with the nails of his fingers at his teeth, whilst he watched me with a gaze that was rendered indescribably pathetic by the soft near-sighted look of his grey eyes under the shadow of his forehead, that had a wrinkled, twisted, even distorted aspect with the pain his soul was in. There was but one way of giving him relief, and that was by plying him with questions to enable him to let loose his thoughts. He extended his hand for the brandy and mixed himself a bumper. There was little in spirits to hurt him at such a time as this. Indeed I believe he could have carried a whole bottle in his head without exhibiting himself as in the least degree oversparred. This second dose distinctly rallied him, and now he lay back in his chair with his arms folded upon his breast.

‘When did your wife leave you, Wilfrid?’